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Wednesday, May 14, 2008

This falls under the "It's OK to knock your own team" rule
Posted by Jill | 6:46 AM
If some guy named Sean O'Malley or Worthington J. Graham were to ask this, it would be tantamount to muttering conspiracies about Jewish bankers and the Rothschilds. But since it's Glenn Greenwald, a Member of the Tribe, it's worth reading his inquiry about why it is that American politicians are expected to swear an oath of loyalty to Israel in a way they aren't required to for any other American ally.

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg conducted what he's calling an "interview" with Barack Obama regarding Israel, but it sounded much more like an inquisition. Goldberg repeatedly demanded that Obama swear his devotion to Israel and affirm prevailing orthodoxies ("I'm curious to hear you talk about the Zionist idea. Do you believe that it has justice on its side?"; "Go to the kishke question, the gut question: the idea that if Jews know that you love them, then you can say whatever you want about Israel, but if we don't know you –- Jim Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski –- then everything is suspect. There seems to be in some quarters, in Florida and other places, a sense that you don’t feel Jewish worry the way a senator from New York would feel it"; "Do you think that Israel is a drag on America's reputation overseas?"; "If you become President, will you denounce settlements publicly?"). Afterwards, Goldberg pronounced himself satisfied: "Obama expressed -- in twelve different ways -- his support for Israel to me."



Marty Peretz, after a telephone conversation with Obama devoted primarily to Israel, similarly clears Obama of any suspicions of disloyalty, approvingly noting that Obama "recognizes" that Israeli settlements of the West Bank are not "the core problem" for the conflict with the Palestinians (to Peretz, such settlements "are very much a side-issue"). Peretz further decrees that Obama's "exhilarating experience with American Jews and with their bonds to the dream and realities of Israel" was evident in both Goldberg's interview and in Obama's call with Peretz.




Isn't it bad enough that Obama's loyalty to THIS country has been questioned because he doesn't like to equate the wearing of a fifty-cent flag pin made in China to love of country? Do we have to make him swear fealty to Israel too? Especially when Obama has a commanding lead over McCain among Jewish voters anyway? Who set up the Zionist punditocracy as the Arbiter of Jewish Acceptability?

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Blogger Bob said...
American Jews have become like the hardcore Irish-Americans who excused the most outrageous acts of the IRA even as the IRA was losing support among the Irish. Dissent among Israelis from the left isn't reported in American media. The Israeli government singles out a few stubborn ultra-zionist West Bank & Gaza settlers & presents them to us as their "bad guys" just to make themselves look reasonable.
5/15/08, 3:35 PM  
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